Happy 2011

So, I had written a nice blog post, which I'd kept short and sweet as we had some great pictures to share*, which I thought would probably be a lot more interesting for everyone than our ramblings. Unfortunately, we then got Ed's camera and our laptop stolen from our hotel room so no blog post and no pics, as the photos on the camera were backed up on the laptop. Bad news for us, and bad news for you, as we will now have to resume rambling.

We have spent our Christmas and New Year holidays on the coast. We boarded the overnight train to Mombasa on the 23rd December and having been warned that dinner was really bad** we opted for bringing our own wine on board and had that for tea instead. We were all quite excitable and spent a lot of the evening with the lights out in our cabin looking our the window to see if we could spot elephants. Sadly two baboons was all the team managed to clock up.

We then spent four nights in Mombasa staying with another volunteer, Heather. Mombasa is very different from Nairobi. It feels much more Arabic and there's a pleasant kind of faded glory about it. The old town is really rather lovely. The coast in general is much slower and more relaxed than Nairobi - it's steamy and hot, so people take things easy and don't rush about too much (which means that things like trying to get a meal in a restaurant can take forever - we have played a lot of cards this week while waiting for meals to arrive, and one meal took two and a half hours to arrive, only for one of our party to be told 'sorry, I meant to tell you we've run out of beef so you don't have your meal'. Nice.).

Christmas Eve was spent on the perfect white sand of Diani beach, and Christmas Day was spent at a cheesy resort which had a bar in the swimming pool - 80s-tastic, and we loved it (although Eddie was pining for the snow).










In the evening when it was cooler we all mucked in to cook Christmas dinner for nine, with no oven, three gas burners and three power cuts. At least the corkscrew didn't let us down and we did manage to get a glass of mulled wine each, which made us all instantly overheat and sweat buckets.

We then moved North up the coast to Kilifi, which is a sleepy little town by the sea, divided by a creek lined with mangrove swamps. It is outrageously beautiful. One of the highlights of our stay was a day spent snorkelling at a quiet little marine reserve with starfish, puffer fish, sea anenomes (sp?) and probably little Nemo. Our New Years Eve was also very special. A lot of the Kenyan volunteers had gathered here, so about 20 of us hired a traditional dhow sailing boat and were taken for a trip around the creek as the sun went down (glass of wine in hand, of course), before we all hopped out for a swim and a BBQ on a secluded beach. Then it was all back to our hotel for a party around the rooftop pool, which was great fun and only slightly marred by a really bad DJ - even the Kenyans weren't dancing (no Kenny Rogers you see).

All in all, a pretty promising start to 2011, and by this point I suspect some of our readers are quietly thinking that having our stuff stolen was probably just karma for all the amazing things we've done. Perhaps they're right. We can only say that we hope everyone else has had just as good a time. Happy 2011!

*Thanks to Heather for providing the pics for this post, which I've added at a later date
** What food should you not serve on a rickety old train? Soup. What do they serve? Soup. I seriously doubt anyone gets to eat much of it.